Trying something new

When I busted out my new sock yarn I was pleased to find that it was already split into two skeins, each of which was nicely twisted into a standard hank. Rather than start off by turning both of the skeins into center-pull balls (booooring), I decided to try out a method I read about on the Yarn Harlot's blog back in November.

Basically, I just untwist the skein and let it sit in a large loop on my lap (or around my neck like a necklace, which is what I've been doing so far) and knit it straight off the skein. There's a much greater chance that I'll end up tangling the whole thing into a giant Gordian knot, but so far it seems to be working well. When I want to get up, either the knitting (and yarn) come with me (as it did for a stand-around-and-make-decisions-about-my-new-kitchen-counter meeting this morning), or else I pick up the yarn, retwist it into a skein, and tuck it away with the knitting in a place where LazyToddler can't reach it.

One benefit I've seen to doing it this way is that every time I unwind one loop from my skein, I can knit for a long time, much longer than I can with one pull out of a center-pull ball. Instead of knit,knit,knit,pull,knit, it's more like unwrap,knitknitknitknitknitknitknitknitknitknitknitknit,unwrap. I don't think it actually saves me much time, as it takes less time to pull from the ball than it does to unwrap a loop from the skein, but at least I look a little less spastic when knitting.